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Seymour Hersh And The Dangers Of Corporate Muckraking
By Mark Ames, originally posted on Pando Daily
Seymour Hersh And The Dangers Of Corporate Muckraking
“The Times wasn’t nearly as happy when we went after business wrongdoing as when we were kicking around some slob in government.” — Seymour Hersh
In its original meaning, “muckraking journalism” was all about exposing the awful power that corporations, trusts, and monopolies exercised over people and the broader public interest. So why doesn’t Seymour Hersh, considered the premiere “muckraker” of the past few decades, turn his fearless muckraking guns on private corporate power?
Ida Tarbell dug deep into Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire and all the ways it exercised a kind of private government tyranny over huge swathes of public life; Tarbell’s work directly influenced the antitrust breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. Upton Sinclair exposed brutality in the meatpacking industry — on its workers, the slaughtered animals, and the diseased, rat-infested meats that eventually wound up in consumers’ homes — leading to the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Administration. Other muckraking exposés led to state-level child labor and workers’ comp laws, the progressive income tax amendment, and laws placing vast expanses of land and forests under federal protection from rapacious robber barons.
But Hersh and others we today call “muckrakers” focus almost exclusively on taking on government power and the national security state power — not the power of private governments (corporations, oligopolies) that exert so much mundane existential power over our mundane little existences. To the extent that muckrakers today do delve into concentrated private power, it’s usually to expose the influence of corporate money in government, which reinforces the basic operating assumptions today that power is in the hands of public government, and that corporate power is only a problem when it co-opts government power.
The nearly exclusive focus on fighting government power started with the baby boomers in the mid-late 1970s, as they retreated from politics and labor unions, and ditched the sort of university Marxist rhetoric that filled the pages of old Ramparts magazine issues.
There are a lot of reasons for this trend in muckraking journalism over the past few decades, away from fighting private corporate power, in favor of fighting government power — but the most obvious reason of all is the one you won’t hear about much because it’s not very glamorous or heroic: It’s better for your journalism career — and easier — to take on the government leviathan, than it is to take on private corporate power.
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If it ain't news it ain't news
Thanks, Tyler. This article lacks flair, but has real substance.
Does it really? Is anyone surprised that the CORPORATE media is reluctant to report on CORPORATIONS? The whole article is an elaboration of the obvious. Now, sometimes the obvious needs to be restated for clarity and reflection, but the target audience for a piece like this pretty much knows it all already.
Of more utility would have been an elucidation of how the dynamic between media, corporations, and the government has changed since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the media feared corporations because (a) they didn't want to lose ad revenue and (b) corporations had deep pockets and armies of lawyers. So they went after government instead. Today, media executives, corporate executives, and government bureaucrats have merged into a single elite class, making them for all intents and purposes the exact same people-- which explains why the media doesn't report on ANYTHING of consequence, and is strictly a propaganda arm. Any mainstream journalists subordinate to this elite who want to publish a real story are going to wind up out of work, or having their Mercedes Benz accelerate to 120mph and steer itself into a tree.
Seymour Hersh is a dinosaur. The fact that Ames used him as the focus of his story tells you right away it's 40 years out of date.
They are now symbiotic, yes. One carves the totem pole, the other erects it and they both command that the masses gaze, submit, and obey.
He is one guy against a few million fucking jerks. Now how could he possibly expose all of them? Seymour may not report on certain things and people, but its most likeley beause he values his hide a bit.
No, Ames used him because Hersh is one of the better, long-lived examples of muckrakers, i.e., Hersh is NOT corporate media lackey but had to depend on them to get published. More-so twenty years ago - it's clear he doesn't give a damn either way now and is resentful of the times he had to get on his knees to them for a paycheck.
Ames makes it pretty clear that Hersh couldn't get his articles published BY corporate media without extensive editing and watering down. You're making an assertion that Hersh, himself, IS corporate media without any backing for that laughable argument.
I get the point that Hersh publishing anything in the NYT makes him a part of corporate media, but he's hardly a corporate media owner or spokesperson. He figured out that nobody can attack corporations and still 1) live, 2) not get sued out of existence, or 3) ever published by corporate media. He buckled and reverted back to government muckraking because that was - relatively speaking - less fatal for one's career.
Judge him for that if you must, but accusing him of BEING corporate media is just preposterous.
"...Today, media executives, corporate executives, and government bureaucrats have merged into a single elite class, making them for all intents and purposes the exact same people-- which explains why the media doesn't report on ANYTHING of consequence, and is strictly a propaganda arm. Any mainstream journalists subordinate to this elite who want to publish a real story are going to wind up out of work, or having their Mercedes Benz accelerate to 120mph and steer itself into a tree...."
The entire article explains how this is exactly what happened to Hersh. How much more directly could you expect Ames to elucidate this? That's why he wrote the article, and why Hersh is a good subject of that pervasive corporate control internally and externally.
"Even the appearance of impropriety can prompt a public official to resign, but businessman have rarely been held to that standard of public trust"
Time they are a changing, now they get bonuses.
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.jobs-review.com
Why'd Zacharias Moussaoui (so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker) have Blackwater's number in his notebook?
https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/604338712516939776
What does 'limited hangout' mean anyway? In ZH terms that is.
limited hangouts
its when psymore cia hertz puts his secumscribed
cocken betwixed through the hole
in the public toileta doors and walls
of man hatten
and waits
waits
thus sprach the terms limited hanging
fruits
and the early worm cashes the birds
ah, but the 2nd mouse gets the cheese...
Tony 'Hasbara' Wilson - in time and on cue to randomly attack Sy Hersh with the lame-assed 'limited hangout' accusation. [sigh...] It must be all the rage on Pintrest and Reddit.
Tony - you go, girl! Never mind me - I +1'ed you for automatically showing up on a Sy article. What would ZH be wihtout you?
Dunno Paveway. Most of the time I agree w/you, but on Seymour Hersh I think you are wrong. He seems to appear with a 'scoop' when the 'official narrative' has gone stale or sour.
Look at it this way- If he's allowed to report scandalous things without being exiled, he's probably fulla shit. Just stands to reason.
Not your reddie.
"...Look at it this way- If he's allowed to report scandalous things without being exiled, he's probably fulla shit..."
Look at who has 'allowed' him to publish his most recent scathing stories: The London Review of Books (not the New York Times). Ames article explains how Hersh was NOT allowed to publish scandalous things against corporations. He wanted to and I wish he would have kept doing so, but the corporate mafia scared him off. He WOULD HAVE been exiled if he kept banging heads with them as Ames points out. Hersh had to switch back to the relatively 'safer' U.S. government muckracking to be published.
Even then, there are scandalous things he IS NOT ALLOWED to have published in corporate media today. The NYT will simply refuse to publish it at all, or only publish it after heavy-handed editing to make it useless. That's why some of those scandalous things end up being published in - of all places - the London Review of Books. <== THAT is NOT corporate media, that IS exile. That's the back alley where authors that don't toe the corporate media line go in order to get published AT ALL. They all know that. Sy knows exactly what NYT will publish and what they won't. If it's scandalous things, then he doesn't even bother submitting it to the Times. If he walks into the Times tomorrow with a corporate media=approved article, they WILL publish it because they know Sy Hersh helps sell their rag for them and appear bold and edgy (as laughable as that sounds).
The other part about exile to LRoB is the pay (if there is even any). He get's paid WELL for corp-media-approved articles in the NYT. If he spends six months writing something and it ends up in LRoB, then Hersh was working for free.
Paveway, no offense but you sound like a retarded Goy.
I'm a limited-hangout goy, bitch (no offense).
Obviously a Goy can be both, limited-hangout and retarded.
First of all, please know I mean you no harm. I gather from your commentary that you, yourself, are a journalist of some sort.
That, in and of itself doesn't mean you should in all cases support other journalists, [Seymour Hersh] 'cos they might be fulla shit.
Some evidence points to Osama's death in late 2001 of renal failure.
Others [Benazir Bhutto] say he was killed- she said this in 2006.
What is almost certain, however, is that Osama bin Laden was NOT captured and killed in Pakistan by Navy Seal Team 6, and buried at sea, as was reported.
Sy's version aside, can you imagine a society that dwells in the desert adopting a practice of burial at sea?
The only conclusion I can derive from all that is that they're all fulla shit.
I reckon that the republican party [yeh the US really does run the world] is due it's turn in the white house and Sy is doing his part to discredit Obama & Co., and by extension, Hitlery- as if she needed any help.
The weird part is, that the American public is by now so fucking stupid, that it may not work.
"...First of all, please know I mean you no harm..."
First of all, understand that this is Fight Club - Fuck me. But nice of you to say so, ace.
"...I gather from your commentary that you, yourself, are a journalist of some sort..."
Closest I ever got was being the photographer for my high school newspaper. We didn't have a camera that semester. I got a C-, if I recall. I switched to welding the next semester and started the tattered bottom edge of my favorite pair of bell-bottomed jeans on fire without knowing it. I ended up with an A+ in welding, so there you go.
"...That, in and of itself doesn't mean you should in all cases support other journalists, [Seymour Hersh] 'cos they might be fulla shit..."
I don't think you understand my position - I DON'T CARE IF HERSH IS RIGHT OR WRONG in any given case. He's an investigative journalist - I like what he does. I like his style. I judge him by his ability to dig for additional information ('unnamed' sources or not), his ability to make us think, not by his ability to sell an agenda or prove anything in a court of law.
Is Hersh entirely unbiased and 100% accurate? Hell no - no journalist alive will ever be a replacement for critical thinking or the truth. At the very least, a good journalist filters out the useless, baseless crap and agenda-pushing and lays out what's left in a reasonable manner. There is NOT a fine line between a good journalist describing what he found and a bad journalist leading you to their conclusion - they're worlds apart and I think it's pretty easy to distinguish the difference.
Hersh does not automatically get a pass because he may have spent six months on an article that gets published for free in some obscure periodical. If his logic is flawed and his arguments are unreasonable, then screw him.
Re: bin Laden's death "...The only conclusion I can derive from all that is that they're all fulla shit..."
Congratulations. You disagree with Hersh and you explained why. You didn't win (in my mind) because it's not a contest, but neither did Hersh. Neither of you has such a compelling argument that I have to face-palm myself and declare a victor. Tomorrow, you and Hersh will have some other opinion on something else. I will give both you and Hersh the benefit of a doubt without pre-declaring either of you 'full of shit' before reading whatever either of you write. You because you're posting a reasoned comment on ZH. Hersh because of the nature of his 45-years of investigative journalism prior to this.
But what about Bin Laden? Fuck Bin Laden! He might not even be dead. I just don't know and have not seen any compelling argument on either of the ten different theories. I doubt we'll ever know. You have a different opinion - maybe you're right. Hersh's theory meshes nearly completely with the familiar, repeatedly-used slime-ball tactics of the U.S. government and I think Hersh fleshed out the back-story well enough.
Like I said before, the story is that the government lied to us repeatedly about Bin Laden and everything related to him. What REALLY happened? Something other than the government said, period. None of the particular outcomes affects that single, most important fact one bit. If either you or Hersh are 100% wrong, the government still lied to me. That's 1,000 times more troubling than the answer to "Does Hersh win the conspiracy theory cage-match?"
"...I reckon that the republican party [yeh the US really does run the world] is due it's turn in the white house and Sy is doing his part to discredit Obama & Co., and by extension, Hitlery- as if she needed any help..."
Hersh's entire career has revolved around government muckraking - he didn't start last year. He leans left, but has never pulled any punches with the democrats or liberals in my reckoning. He hates neocon psychopaths and their minions. So do I, so I'm probably biased when it comes to his writing.
"...The weird part is, that the American public is by now so fucking stupid, that it may not work..."
ZH gets three-quarters of a million hits a day and a good portion are probably Americans. Stupid people don't read ZH, the blogs of the contribution authors or other alternative news sites. Corporate mainstream media is dying a slow death. The second anyone starts worrying about MARKETING critical-thinking skills or intellectual curiosity to the masses, you know your doomed - it can't be done. I'm glad that Fox, CNN and the NYT are out there. Can you imagine what the comments section here would look like with the Kardashian crowd adding their two-cents worth of Twitter-telligence?
Paveway, you've given me more than I can digest in one sitting- still, I think we mostly agree, no?
You might be surprised how many non-Americans speak and write fluent English, tho.
Haven't you ever thought it odd that the Hersh's of this world only seem to appear with an alternative when the 'official story' is (or is about to be) revealed to be absolute bullshit?
At any rate, we're good, I hope.
"...still, I think we mostly agree, no?" Yes, we do.
"...You might be surprised how many non-Americans speak and write fluent English, tho..."
That was more directed to your statement about the American public being so stupid that it doesn't matter. Which is probably more true than not - I won't argue with that. I'm just pointing out that there's still a few of us intelligent, critical-thinking Americans left as evidenced by the popularity of sites like ZH. A painfully small number, though. I just wanted to point out that we're not entirely extinct YET - it didn't have anything to do with the specific point you were making.
"...Haven't you ever thought it odd that the Hersh's of this world only seem to appear with an alternative when the 'official story' is (or is about to be) revealed to be absolute bullshit?..."
Digging for something closer to the truth takes time, especially when people that have that information are actively trying to hide it from you. It's the nature of disassembling a web of self-reinforcing lies and obfuscations. It will ALWAYS sound a bit like conspiracy theories or rumors because the official story is just bullshit.
It doesn't surprise me that Hersh and others take a while to ferret out the truth (or at least a far more credible scenarios) and several alternative explanations appear to come out around the same time. Again, I'm (personally) more intersted in credible evidence that government or military officials hid the truth or outright lied to me. Hersh or any other journalists can't be guaranteed to 'discover' the ultimate and irrefutable truth until they develop the ability to read minds or time-travel.
I will settle for a reasonably skeptical, intelligent and ethical journalist with the ability to think critically and offer me a REASONABLE alternative or plausable scenario. I don't give a shit if they can prove their story in a court of law. I don't hold them to that standard because if I did, I could write them all off right now and simply swallow the spoon-fed official government story without question.
If you believe the government mostly tells the whole truth and rarely lies, then I could understand dismissing investigative journalists as hacks living off the back of sensationalism. No doubt, there are a lot of journalists exactly like that out there that do come out with stories after the fact at the same time that the stories from legitimate investigative journalists start appearing. There's a world of difference thought between some hack piecing together a few of the latest tidbits of information as an offical story is collapsing and what decent investigative journalists like Sy Hersh and all the rest do. It takes them months to put together their stories, not hours.
If I thought Hersh was pushing and adgenda or was a sensationalist hack, I would say so. I respect his work, his sincerity and his track record of smoking out rats and I'm saying so. I don't necessarily AGREE with everything he wrote, but I'll always read his work by giving him the benefit of a doubt up front. That's based on the last forty years of his work, not the last year or two.
"...At any rate, we're good, I hope..."
You have rational, thoughtful comments and opinions - some of them different than mine. I come here to read comments from posters like you, not comments from posters like me.
As for rational, thoughtful comments and opinions- I return that sentiment a thousand-fold.
And, if we ever agree on everything, it means we've become the sheep we decry, and you have my permission to just shear and shoot me.
Thanks for the well considered reply!
I'll re-think Hersh, too.
Amen Paveway .. not everyone is part of some conspiracy ... actually .. a few are left alone for one reason or another that might include Hersh .. . but if the name is jewsih sounding . .old Brit dog Tony willl be there with some nasty comment. Here come the down votes.. I could give a rats ass. Working in MSM media .. requires someone with sensibilities of a brain surgeon and skin of a rhino .... only more or less modern journo who goes after conrporations is Matt Taibi of Rolling Stone .. .. the phrase vampire squid comes directly from him. He does a pretty good job on bankers and corpos ... but am sure he does not make the same money as Hersh .. the old media is dying .. thank God. Long live alternative.
gnome chump
sy herzel
snowblow
and ass ange
paveways truther girls
they cannot find much intel on israel butt
they all love informarty gay weddings and diversity
Had to up u for that one Tony... You are one sly basser
oh man, oh what a tangled web.
the only solution is the bacteria.
henry is terrified due to the reportage
of hersh. ok, sure.
this old man should shut up and get back down the horse meat trojan fist gentle mans sauna lower up to mid town.
he puts words together in the once believable tora talmoo fashion.
this rabbi royalty is a busted flush just like his colon.
please no more saymore hershey
Did some Jewish kid beat the crap out of you and anally rape when you were little, Tony?
You seem to have an unusual fixation on 1) their penises and 2) their colons.
I'm particularly disgusted by the actions of the psychopaths in Israel, but their penises and colons don't seem to be particularly (and certainly not personally) threatening. You know the conservative right in Israel hates Sy Hersh as well, yet you seem to take great pains to make some tenuous connection between them because they're both Jewish.
I can only conclude that Sy Hersh's penis and colon are personally threatening to you. That's... disturbing in ways that I don't even want to imagine.
paveway A
is that a big bomba from the pentagun
laser guide precisioner
not much of a take down
the old man is a blackmailed homosexualist have i touch a raw nerve i hope not that would be messy.
stick an elton jon track on and chill me darlin
Just Saying...
Of the sixty-seven(67) senior executives of the major television and radio news networks, forty-seven(47) are Jews or have Jewish spouses. This is a numerical representation of 70%. Jews are approximately 2% of the U.S. population.* Therefore Jews are over-represented among the senior executives of the major television and radio news networks by a factor of 35 times(3,500 percent).
* Jewish Population of the United States by State:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop.html
https://thezog.wordpress.com/who-controls-the-news-part-1/
https://undertheradarmedia.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/who-controls-the-med...
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-controlledpress-newspapers.html
I thought corporations were the government.
No, but Corporate Executives are. An important distinction.
One would almost thing that but probably they are not, though they would like to be. I say The Iron Bank is Government, corporations and governments (small g there) are the tools of the Government. Remember now, all the big corps are taking on huge debt to buy back their own stocks at all time highs. Who benefits from that in the end? Someone owns, or will soon own, the corporations. C letters come and go like rock stars - easily replaceable.
Some real muckrakers Hersh can't hold a candle too.
A question for Hersh would be have you renounced his Judaism?
Links below:
Books 1-3 - The History of Great American Fortunes
Or you can find a good audiobook reading of the History of Great American Fortunes on Youtube. There are other readings, but this is very good one. The link is:
https://youtu.be/uk7l2EZBD6s (Part 1)
Book 4 - Richard F. Pettigrew Triumphant Plutocracy
You cannot navigate the future if you do not understand the past!
My two cents worth is that he has been bullied, bludgeoned and blackmailed, just like the rest of us.
How much have you got to loose by going off the reservation?
Jew Hersh say whaaaaat? Does this actor have one of these? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijJipyk1ZFw
What a bunch of BS. The author, while decrying totalitarian corporations, is defending totalitarian, monopolistic, lying, thieving, destroying, aggressive government administrations. Like reporting on the wrongdoing of the Obama administration is taking the easy way out? Ask Sharyl Attkisson.
Mark Ames was one of the few sent out to do a hatchet job.
Where the outrage from Ames on the insolvency of social security, the debasement of the current to enable further government debt, etc etc etc
Classic BS indeed
Really good to hear the US government "is constrained by the Constitution". Perhaps the author could drop a note about that to Obama.
"G&W vice president Charles Davis was assigned the role of company front man dealing with Hersh and the Times..." Actually, his name was Martin Davis, not to be confused with Marvin Davis, the head of 20th Century Fox.